Feeding & Nutrition

The monstera was the first casualty. Then the fern. Then a perfectly innocent spider plant that had survived three moves and a drought, and I came home to find it decapitated at the soil, the cat, Maud, sitting beside the evidence with the look of someone who'd done the household a favour.

I'd read that cats eat greenery to shift something in their gut, a bit of roughage, a way to bring up the hairball before it builds, and that the houseplants they choose are usually the wrong ones, the waxy toxic kind that sends you to the emergency vet instead of the relief they were after. So rather than fence off every leaf in the flat, I gave her the right one.

Cat grass is just wheat or barley seed, sold in little punnets at the pet shop for less than a coffee, and I potted a tray on the windowsill where the light comes in flat and yellow in the mornings, and within days there was a green fringe growing that Maud watched with the focus she usually reserves for the biscuit tin.

She took to it the way I'd hoped. A nibble here, a chew there, the occasional enthusiastic chomp followed by the satisfied slackness of a cat who's done what her body asked, and the monstera, relocated to a high shelf she can't reach without a ladder, stopped losing limbs entirely.

I learned to keep the tray going. It grows fast and goes blond at the tips if you let it dry out, so I water it like a small commitment, which it is, and when one tray tires I start another in the same spot so there's never a gap she'll try to fill with my houseplants, a lesson I paid for in foliage.

Is it necessary. Not for every cat, and some ignore it entirely in favour of your shoelaces, but for a chewer like Maud it redirected a habit that was costing me plants and risking her stomach, and the windowsill now reads as a small garden she owns rather than a row of forbidden things she's planning to raid.

The neighbours think I've taken up horticulture. I have, sort of, in the narrowest possible sense, and the only harvest is a cat with a contented gut and a flat full of plants that have stopped dying mysterious deaths, which is a green thumb of a very specific kind.

There's a quieter benefit I didn't expect. Watching the grass grow gave me a reason to look at the windowsill each morning, a small green task in a flat that can feel grey in February, and Maud and I now share that corner, her nibbling, me watering, both of us a bit more settled for the ritual than we were before the monstera lost its head.

There's a rhythm to it I didn't expect to enjoy. Every few days I snip the longest blades with scissors and drop them in her bowl, and she eats them with the focus of a connoisseur, selecting, nibbling, occasionally rejecting a stalk that didn't meet her standard, a fussiness I find oddly flattering in a creature who eats flies by accident.

The vet said the chewing is normal and the grass itself is harmless, that the worry is only when they go for the wrong plant, the one with the waxy leaf or the trailing vine, and that keeping the right one within reach is cheaper than the alternative, which is a panicked drive and a bill and a cat who's learned that greens equal the carrier.

Maud's stopped eyeing the ferns entirely. Whether it's the tray satisfying whatever itch the houseplants represented, or simply that the legal option sits where she can reach it, I can't say, but the spider plant has put out three new leaves since the grass arrived, and I'm calling that a draw in a war I'd been quietly losing.

I've started a second tray in the kitchen for when the first goes to seed, a small relay of green that keeps the windowsill productive through the dull months, and the act of watering something every morning, even something destined to be chewed, has made the flat feel less like a waiting room and more like a place with a point, which is more than I expected from a punnet of seed.

The tray's become a small fixture of the morning, the first thing I check after the kettle, and Maud now waits by the sill while I mist it, a quiet appointment we keep with each other, her for the green, me for the evidence that the flat is still standing, which after the monstera feels like a victory worth a daily glance.

I've taken to snipping a few blades into my own salad too, mostly for the joke, and the taste is mild and grassy and faintly pointless, but there's something pleasing about sharing the cat's crop, a tiny commune of two at the windowsill, her the expert, me the amateur, both of us a little calmer for the ritual than we were before the leaves started disappearing.